Winifred Horrabin (1887 - 1971)

Winifred Horrabin's status as a member of the British labour movement has often been viewed through the prism of her husband, the political cartoonist James Francis (Frank) Horrabin (1884-1962).  She worked alongside her husband for many years within the Fabian Society, the Communist Party, the Labour Colleges movement and the Socialist League.  Her autobiographical and literary writings reveal a woman whose convictions were independently conceived, briefly as a suffragette and over a more sustained period as a socialist, but who was devastated, personally and politically, by the breakdown of her marriage in the early 1940s. 

 

Essay by Winifred Horrabin

 

Extract from an essay by Winifred Horrabin about her involvement
in the early women's movement, written in the 1960s [DWH/2/4]

 

As a young woman, Horrabin joined the Women's Social and Political Union, the militant wing of the campaign for women's suffrage, which was led by Emmeline Pankhurst with the motto 'Deeds not words'.  Horrabin disrupted a speech by Winston Churchill in 1909 with the suffragette cry of 'Votes for women!'.  But by the early 1910s, following her marriage to Frank Horrabin and now living in London, she moved away from feminism and towards Fabianism and Guild Socialism.  In this she was influenced not only by her husband and the circles within which she moved in London, but also by an artistic and ethical approach to politics which she found in the writings of William Morris.

 

Until well into the 1920s, the focus of her work was the Labour Colleges movement.  She acted as honorary secretary to the Plebs League, which was set up in 1908 to promote independent working class education and which was behind the creation of a Central Labour College in 1909 (designed to rival Ruskin College).   The Central Labour College moved to London in 1911 and Horrabin organised a Women's League in 1913 to focus on the education of women workers.  Both she and her husband wrote regularly for the journal, The Plebs, which Frank Horrabin edited, and she was also involved in fundraising and publicity.  Her husband lectured at the college and together they wrote Working class education (1924).  The movement nationally introduced workers to ideas and theories of political economy, scientific socialism and industrial unionism, and aimed to raise their class consciousness.

 

Journal of visit to Soviet Union, 1926

 

Extract from a journal of a visit to the Soviet Union by Winifred Horrabin in 1926 [DWH/1/32]

 

In the late 1920s, Winifred Horrabin travelled to the Soviet Union and to Poland and wrote journals and essays recording her experiences.  Her visit to the Soviet Union appears to have been arranged by the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR and her companion was Nellie [Ablett?].  She describes Moscow in May 1926: "Soviet Russia was then romance.  Everything was a thrill to us.  Even the address of the Volga [Hotel] pleased us and the simple fact that the hotel servants were heavily bearded, beards had not come in for the English intellectuals in 1926".

 

The following triptych was given to GDH Cole and Margaret Postgate by their closest friends on their marriage in 1918.  It includes the names of Winifred and Frank Horrabin and reveals a social and political network of people who stayed together on the Left into the 1930s and 1940s through various different political parties and groups. 

 

GDH Cole and Margaret Cole's marriage 

 

Triptych designed and produced by Robin Page Arnot (those listed include his wifeLeila and daughter Barbara) [DX/198/1] 

 

Some of these were involved with the Horrabins in setting up the Socialist League in 1932.  Winifred Horrabin chose the name for the Socialist League, in direct reference to the party with the same name which was founded by William Morris in 1884.  The Socialist League was intended to replace the Independent Labour Party as the left wing of the Labour Party, after the ILP dissafiliated in 1932.  Its programme advocated nationalisation and a planned economy, was opposed to war and in favour of united action against fascism in Britain.  However it did not last beyond 1937 because the Labour Party declared that membership of the League was incompatible with that of the Labour Party. 

 

After separating from her husband in 1942 when she was in her mid '50s, Horrabin moved to Oxford and worked as a freelance journalist for various newspapers, including The Tribune.  She wrote numerous autobiographical essays and memoirs in the 1960s, but these were never published.  A surviving notebook from 1943 contains 'notes for an autobiographical novel called "Death of a woman"'. 

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